Hugo Williams, Billy's Rain
Tom Paulin, The Wind Dog
Reviewed by Michael Graber
On a recent business trip I met three youngish Londoners. Curious if the media buzz that proclaimed a "Poetry Renaissance in British Isles" was a substantial claim or mere hype, I asked them about the state of poetry in their native land. One guffawed. The others looked baffled, seeming embarrassed for me. Poetry, they implied, how absurd! These were suave, educated professionals in the advertising and Web consulting business: a field where the timely injection of a literary quote saves countless meetings from drowning in doldrums. Yet, none could name a Poet Laureate since Tennyson. They did not recall even the mega-famous Ted Hughes. Hughes' potent mythical work not withstanding, perhaps the reason for their ignorance is the poetry itself.
The books that either win or are short-listed for the top prizes in England today (not including Ireland's Seamus Heaney or the aforementioned Hughes) often show a rootless poetic — unrehearsed craft at work, sloppy intellectual or emotional conceits, sometimes breezy, sometimes jarring, rarely effective musicality — that usually falls hard on its self-conscious face. In short, the poets of the British Empire that have followed the relentlessly experimental muse of Modernism have disembodied the art of poetry from the corpus of cultural dialogue.
Luckily, there is an undercurrent of change. Throughout the 70s, 80s, and 90s many poets in England suddenly realized they had been duped. They woke up thinking, "O Lord, Modernism is a bill of goods sold to us by crafty Americans ... Eliot, Pound ... How could we have been under its spell for so long." Many insisted that their essential tradition went through Hardy to Larkin and that Modernism was a syntactical and thematic Elephant Man imported from the huge rebel colony. Many sensed they had alienated themselves from an audience of common readers.
Unfortunately, the poets still infected with the Modernist virus hold the top publishing and academic positions in England. Yet while my English friends could quote A.E. Housman from memory, they couldn't remember anything remotely Modern other than a poor paraphrase "April is mean" (from The Waste Land) when pressed. Is there something immensely unmemorable inherent in Modernist poetics from England? Will a half-century or more of poetic efforts sail away from the English mind and drown in the backwater of forgetfulness?
Was Modernism merely an American blight on tree of English poetics? Only history will tell. But for now, perhaps regrettably, the English press where St. Louis's biggest Anglophile, T.S. Eliot, served as editor, Faber & Faber, continues to publish and promote verse-less indulgent "poetry" steeped in the arguably outmoded aesthetics of Modernism.
Not surprisingly, one of the two Faber & Faber books published recently was awarded the much-touted, you guessed it, T.S. Eliot Poetry Award. Billy's Rain by Hugo Williams took this honor. Another title shortlisted for the same prize was a Faber & Faber production: The Wind Dog by Irish poet Tom Paulin (now a professor of English at Oxford). There is a clear kinship between the two poets; Paulin even has a clumsy chummy poem about giving a reading with Williams in his sad collection.
Williams, who supports himself as a freelance writer, is clearly a more focused and talented poet than Paulin. Paulin seems content to improvise along the lines of the High Modernists (Joyce, Ford, and Gertrude Stein) without paying any attention to such writing fundamentals as punctuation, sense, dramatic tension, narrative development, metaphoric constructions, and artful lyricism. He strives to be abstruse. While some may coin him as adventurous, I find him merely self-indulgent.
In the title poem, for example, the poet calls the ear "the only true reader" and is vainly smitten with the "lingo-jingo of beginnings." Paulin trips himself by being overly ambitious; he gets almost Faustian with his hopes for language to represent his recurring obsession to depict the point where pre-verbal urges and verbose allusions to meaning meld into a sliver of insight. Paulin aims for a synthesis of Irish and English tensions, language, and ideologies in his work, but the poems are too filled with authorial intent to genuinely communicate. The title poem is 16 pages of maddeningly cute, but insubstantial, rambling wannabe-meditations about a piece of a rainbow. The faux characterization, written in an affected dialect, makes the tepid content even more intolerable. Here are a few sections, picked as randomly as the text itself seems to be:
Here's one descriptive section—
— hey Tammie Jack says
d'you see thon wind dog?
look yonder
— what's a wind dog captain?
— ack a wee broken bitta rainbow
tha's a wind dog
and this bit of metaphysical floundering—
not to roll out the Logos
— at least at the start
or say in the beginning
was the word
— not to start with a lingo
with the lingo jingo of beginnings
unsheathed like a sword
stiff and blunt like a phallus
or masonic like a thumb
— not to begin then arma virumque
— plush Virgil ...
And so this collection trudges on and on ad nausium. His many pieces about painter Marc Chagall throughout the volume serve as examples of the book as a whole. Either Paulin uses the chance to weakly mask a polemic or work out issues of his own academic nightmare. Here's the end of "Marc Chagall, Over the Town: "— like a Brueghel peasant/he's laying a turd/at the edge of their wedding party/ and it isn't hard/to know how serious his face/and his bare bum are/though many a reproduction/mars this famous painting/by omitting not just his arse/but the entire squatting lout/whose absence reminds me/how quite a few/critics of T.S. Eliot/choose/either to forgive or forget/those bits of verse/ and one piece/of coldly sinister prose/that're about/his fear and hatred of all Jews."
While the ending makes a good point, an essay would have been a better medium— the prosody and tone are hideous even as a spontaneous lecture and unforgivable when masquerading as poetry. Illiteracy seems a better option than enduring a volume of such pompous meandering. Paulin should stick with his career of writing criticism, editing anthologies, and teaching, instead of widening the gap between readers and poetry.
Hugo Williams is at least pleasant light reading compared to Paulin. However, the poems in Billy's Rain, which chart the course of a failed love affair, lack style and substance. Meredith's century old Modern Love has more depth and surprise than this collection. As well, Billy's Rain seems like a weakling, a late-blooming cousin to W.D. Snodgrass' 1959 collection, Heart's Needle.
Still, Williams' effort has hints of noteworthy merit. The tone and manner of the collection is as informal as some of Frank O'Hara's best work. These pieces never penetrate the emotional gravity of the situation, but hover on the surface of pain. Readers also get an impression that the poet, who is presumably the main character, stumbles through life with a rare sense of unenlightened awe, but awe nonetheless. The poems keep most of their handiwork off-stage; appearing artless and therefore as impressive as a teenager does in heat.
Instead of lasting art, readers get a sense of the impermanence of the situation from the form and content. The poems themselves are interwoven vignettes that resemble still-wet watercolors hastily painted by a careless lover. A precious few startle and astonish after their frenzied creation. Here's an excerpt from one of the rare, fine pieces in the collection, "Siren Song":
I phone from time to time, to see if she's
changed the music on her answerphone.
'Tell me in two words,' goes the recording,
'what you were going to tell in a thousand.'
I peer into that thought, like peering out
to sea at night, hearing the sound of waves
breaking on rocks, knowing she is there,
listening, waiting for me to speak.
Hugo, in Billy's Rain, rarely writes with such focus and intensity as demonstrated above. The three best poems from the collection would have been sufficient to document the relationship. Instead, readers have to wade through the quagmire of pages and pages of pathetic puppy love. Here's the entire, short text of "During an Absence:"
Now that she has left the room for a moment
to powder her nose,
we watch and wait, watch and wait,
for her to bring back the purpose into our lives.
With the refrain in line three, it seems Williams is setting us up for a high moment. Instead of delivering something sustaining, readers have to suffer while the speaker's whiny co-dependent nature longs for external reward. Perhaps Williams should move to Nashville and set up shop as a tunesmith?
The character, sadly, never develops, never learns from the experiences, and never makes a decisive action. This Modernist tradition of the anti-hero, fate's victim, plays out here to the solipsistic extreme. The ultimate theme of Billy's Rain is not that of a battle of the sexes or even one of love gone awry, but is the saga of a pimply ego dying for anything that resembles love. God save the Queen!
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